HomeTech.fm - Episode 572 - The Self-Care Chair

Episode Date: May 2, 2026

On this week's show: Walmart’s Vizio TVs can’t stream without an account, La‑Z‑Boy gets loud with Klipsch‑powered furniture, and Govee keeps lighting up everything from ceilings to patios, one fixture at a time. Home Assistant hikes the price of Green, eero gets a government seal of approval, ubisys joins the club, and Unraid teams up with 45HomeLab for a monster NAS. Plus ap pick of the week, project updates, and so much more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 1st. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm South Johnson. From Reynoldsburg, Ohio. I'm T.J. Huddleston. And from Pickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Campbell. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast and Podcasts all about home automation, home technology. And, uh, guys, big news here. We've got a second router we can buy.

Nice. The U.S. government, yeah, the U.S. government has officially, uh, said that we can buy Eros. Woo-hoo. You think Amazon. had any play in that? No. You don't think they showed up with an envelope to get certified? Just friends with Jeff Bezos.

I mean, it's just a coincidence. I gotcha. All right. Well, they say they took rigorous testing and stuff with the Amazon security team. Sure. Yeah. So they're saying no data is being sent back to China or anything on the Euros. Is that what the testing is for?

Yeah, sure. Sure. That's what it is. That's what it does. Have they even released guidelines for this? Does anybody actually know what you do? need to do? Because I'm pretty sure there was in guidelines. Pay bribes?

Yeah. I just don't know. I mean, I think they were complaining that there was like backdoors and things weren't getting updated. But it feels like maybe that this was a different, I don't know, a strange way to kind of like proceed. Did you do this? I know there was a lot of vendors

complaining about TP link, which was out there just like eating up the market with their $30 routers. So maybe that was a problem. And they were like, well, we can't have that. Buy an Eero or a net gear. Sure. Well, congratulations, Ero. You in netgear.

You matter. Oh, wait. No, that's not. No, no, no, no. You can route now. Yeah. Speaking of crazy. I guess Nabagasa said the Home Assistant Green is going up in price.

So if you're, if you want that, it's going up about $30. So. That's significant. Ooh. Oh, that's a. That hurts. I thought it was a good price before, though. Yeah.

I bought a bunch of stuff from ubiquity. today. I noticed there was these nice little line items on there. I said memory surcharge. And I was like, I'm not buying anything with memory. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, that is, that's the funny part is you don't realize where memory is used and how much and stuff like that. But I think they're going to abuse this. They're going to use it as a quick cash grab. Oh, my God. I haven't ordered anything from ubiquity in like a week now. I just ordered a bunch of camera stuff last week. But I didn't see the memory surcharge on there last week. But it's, It's definitely there now. That is crazy. Yeah, and it was significant. We only bought, like, a few things, but it was like $40, 20 bucks here and there. And it was like, man, that's adding up quick. So if you have any jobs.

I got to check the Canadian store. Hold on. Yeah, I have nine devices in my car right now, which included, you know, a router, a switch, some access points and stuff like that. The memory search hours is $142. Just raise your freaking price. No, no. It's so aggravating. They're not going to do that.

They'll keep the prices low and then charge you for them. I did buy some, a random thing. I think it was like an accessory or something, and it did not have a memory search for a wall bracket. Yeah, I've been considering buying some stuff from BH photo and video, B&H photo and video, because they don't actually put the tariffs on the product. Their initial charge for the products is like $20 more or whatever.

But if you actually buy it from there, you save like several hundred dollars depending on how much stuff you're going to buy. So I've been always, I've always bought my stuff from the ubiquity store because you get the two-year warranty with it and everything. But now it's just like, if I can save $400 on like a $6,000 order, I'm probably going to do that from now on. And this is all that's doing. It's just making me buy it from somebody else.

Is it, is it memory surcharge on everything? There are certain things it doesn't. I mean, I feel like it's all just like networking stuff at this point. Yeah, everything electronic had it on there, I think. Because I just added a camera, but I'm in the Canadian store and I didn't see it. So maybe it's just because we're paying too much as it is anywhere. Well, so you have to add it to the cart. Did you add a router to the car?

I added to the cart and I did it way as far as doing a checkout and there's nothing there yet. And that was for a camera. Well, if you need anything, but, well, so it's a, on mine, it's only like router, P-O-E switch and access points. All right, let me go and add, uh, but you're in Canada. You don't have tariffs, so. Yeah, but the memory surcharge shouldn't be because of the, correct. Uh, there it is. It's on the switch now.

They got you. They got you. They got us. Because we're paying the tariffs on cameras right now, too. So we're getting hit on everything we buy. Uh, switch pro max 48 P-O-E. It's the U.S. version. It's $1,769, and the memory surcharge is $104.

That is significant. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's one access point. It's $279 access point. It's $4 for the memory surcharge. Just raise it $4. Like, this is the stuff that I hate.

It's like when you go to a restaurant and, like, they don't tell you anywhere until you get the bill. It's like, this bill is going to be, you know, 5% more if you pay with a credit card. It's like, just stop. Just build it into your price. And like, I understand, like, some point if the, you know, the memory surcharge goes away, they're going to lower the price or something. They're not going to lower the price, though. I mean, let's just be honest with each other and just raise the price up and don't, don't add it on to the final bill.

It's so aggravating. Man, it's hitting the switches, though. I mean, wow. Yeah, it's $23 memory surcharge for a $400 switch. Let me see if anyone's adding this memory surcharge to Facebook Marketplace items. That will be your email. It's not quite. how it works, but...

Oh, it is. Well, yeah, I noticed those were on there. As I was checking out, I'm like, man, that sucks. I mean, that changes, like, estimates I literally just sent out last week. Yeah, well, that's what it was. I was, like, sent it out at the beginning of the month-ish, and they finally sent the check-in, and I went to order it because I, like, got to get it fast, and no, no, no, no, no. Slow down.

It's going to cost you an extra $150 on product that has no margin. So, yeah, fun stuff. At least I make money on labor. That's what I tell myself. Yeah, see, we, we charge, we basically just charge, like, a premium to do anything ubiquity, because we give you, like, a year of, like,

tech support for free. So it's, it's one of those things that I try to bundle in, and somebody wants to buy their ubiquity, they can. I don't charge, like, a lot of extra. But you've got to find ways to make a little bit extra money on this kind of stuff. Okay, yeah, for sure. All IT has been that way for a while, so.

Yeah. There was a 24-port switch I was looking at a minute ago that had a $79. It was, like, a $800 switch. $79. $79. Yeah. 48 port POE US version. Gavin, I think this is when you were looking at $64.

So this $800 switch has a $47 memory surcharge. I like how they hide it within the card. So you're going to have to go, you add it to your cart, and you just go look at it. Yeah, that's the annoying thing. It's like they should tell you before you've been added to your car. Yeah. The AIPTZ has a 93-53.

So that's a $13 camera with another $100 tacked on for memory surcharge. Wait, for which one? The AIPTZ, the camera, the industry. Oh, man, the one I just bought. The industrial, yeah. actually, actually, that's a tariff surcharge. So that's, that's kind of, yeah, that's a tariff one. So why are they doing tariff surcharges?

Those are illegal. No, they're not. Okay. How they were implemented was illegal, but not the tariffs themselves. Yeah. I think, you know, the good thing is, okay. Yeah, that's, that's the, not the stolen property you had. That's the most over basic simplification you could say about it, but that's basically

what it was. Yeah. God, AI sucks. AI just needs to go away. Like, why are we doing this to ourselves? I mean... It's so useless. Is it?

I don't know. I watched this, like, John Oliver segment last night on, like, the AI characters and stuff like that. You know, character AI and whatever other ones they talked about. And it's just, like, the most, like, depressing thing ever. It's just, like, single dudes talking to women or, like, you know, virtual chat agents. And it's just like, do we need this in our life? I don't think we do. Yeah.

I mean, I mean, like, the AI, like, the AI. that Seth always deals with. I know Seth's stuff's always broken anyway, but Seth's AI stuff is always broken. It never works. And like,

I always hear people there like, oh, I have to tinker with it. I have to do this. I have to do that. And it's just like, yeah, don't get me started. I mean,

it sounds like home automation, to be honest. Yeah, it is. It's automation just with AI. And yeah, you still send 60% of your time messing with it. But the 40% that it does work.

It's really fun. The sad part is my home assistance more reliable than my AI. Oh, that's bad. That's bad. pretty bad. Yeah. Just stop.

I want my memory and my hard drives back. Because I can't even find hard drives at this point either. What most people are using AI for is stupid stuff, I find, or illegal stuff. I mean, there's so much good that could be done with it that that's what I'm waiting on to start seeing results from. You know, when are we going to cure cancer with AI? I mean. Probably already have, and they just are not allowing it to get released, you know? Yeah, they'll have like a better Viagra before they have cure cancer.

Exactly, you know? Or those GPT1 pills or whatever they're calling on. There's new peptides. They're up to like GGGPT5 or whatever it is. I don't know. I can't remember the name of all. That's the thing right now in San Francisco. Like if they're like, they're basically importing these peptides and like brewing them and then taking them themselves.

Like it's a thing going on right now. Yeah. When are we going to get like Ozempic made by AI? Oh man. your feet eat themselves. Yeah. All right. Well, we got a bunch of home tech headlines.

So what do you guys say we jump in? Let's do it. All right, big news, Alexa Plus, now available in Español there in Spain. So, yeah, according to Therot.com, this is the latest in our European series, our other language series of Alexa Plus going out into Europe and invading. So what do we have? We had England. We had Italy. Now you got Spain.

Woo-hoo. I don't have any offensive jokes about Spain. But this is cool. I like sweet. I like sports things to go everywhere. The rain mainly falls on the plains. I don't remember something like that. Is it offensive?

No. It was my fair lady, I think. Let's see. Ubiquity's got a new site manager. And this announcement, like, is the most corporate thing I think I've ever seen. Like, this is, Gavin, this is straight. This is for you. Like, it has every buzzwords for IT, like the enterprise IT people in here.

I stopped reading after a certain point. I'm sorry. When they started mentioning, like, fabric and stuff like that. Yeah, I've heard about a lot of this before, and I was just like, yeah, I don't think my home lab will ever grow this big. They're shooting straight for, you know. Multi-sites and stuff. Yeah, back in, like, it has a full, like, role management platform now

that integrates with your SSO stuff or, you know, for Microsoft or Google. It depends on what domain you have all that running through. This is all like corporate stuff. But good that they have it, I guess. Good that they have it. Because their basic logins and like how you add users and stuff, it was pretty basic and it can only go so far. This will get them the rest of the way for corporate IT, I think.

And that's where the big money is. Yeah, exactly. Like that's when you can charge $5,000 for a switch. Mm-hmm. And it's funny, like the ad they have here is like, they'll charge, they'll pay $5,000. Yeah. But then also they're like, they're like,

there are like no licensing fee. I'm like, hmm, you're leaving money on the table, ubiquity. Like, enterprise just wants to pay you

those licensing fees. I remember way back, you know, a couple of years ago, we were talking to one of the, the unified people at CDia, and these guys are all coming in from like the,

the, the, the discos of the world or, you know, net gears and that kind of thing. It's like, they're coming in from the corporate side of things, right?

And they're just like, yeah, the owner, he's like just flat, wants to sell straight to the consumer. He doesn't want to deal with any licensing. It's like a hard-lined, like no licensing, bare bones price straight to the consumer.

So, you know, we're going to cut out all this middle BS in the middle. And it's been pretty successful, I think. But like, it was just funny to, like, hear him say that. And then, like, see some of the moves they're making now where it's like, yeah, if you want to pay us for that extra license, here's a thousand dollars a year or whatever. You can pay us for that. It's like, we'll invoice you for it.

You can give us money for that if it makes you feel better. And it's like, there's still, there's a sales guy going like, we're freaking out because he's leaving money on a table somewhere. Yeah, but I give him credit for that because he's thinking different. He's thinking outside the box. You know, like, you know, like, you got, yeah, you got to find a way to separate yourself and you're competing with Cisco and stuff. You're not necessarily their competition.

They're probably not even worried about you. You're just trying to get a little piece of that pie, right? Exactly. Well, good good luck, Unify. Maybe now the voice over IP phones will integrate with the rest of their product line. Really waiting for that to happen one of these days, one of these days. If you could just release products on time, though, that'd be great. Abman stock. Yeah, it's one of those things. You know, we saw a lot of camera, like, ubiquity camera systems at this point, and, like, you can't even get junction boxes for cameras. Oh, like, this isn't important. Like, I need junction boxes. That's really hard to do. You can't 3D print them.

Yeah. You can use like universal ones, but they look like, but... Well, the site manager does look good, though. Their software, as always, looks pretty good. Oh, this is a fun product. We're going to move to a bunch of lighting news here. We've got a bunch of lighting new products for lighting. So first up, we got a TP link, Matter Downlight with dual light sources.

Now, this is a 6-inch smart recess downlight, right? It's listed as coming soon, has Matter support, no hub required. But this is interesting. It's got like a down facing main light, but then it's got around the trim. It's got like an ambient ring around it that you can change as well. And it's kind of an interesting design. Like it gives you that you could like turn on that for like a nightlight or something like that or, you know, mood lighting or something. But also have the downlight.

You can change that as well or match it or whatever you want to do it. But I don't know. I thought it was an interesting design. What do you think? This is nothing new. No? You could actually, no, the only thing new about it is they actually have matter support, but you could actually order these kind of lights off of Amazon.

I haven't seen these. It's interesting. I installed one last summer. Yeah, usually just do like one or two of them, though, right? Like, it's like an entryway or something like that. No, we put them into a house last summer, and we did them all like this, and they, you can control the outer ring. The only thing is you don't really have control over all the colors.

There's the colors in the one I wanted, in the one we installed. Um, but you can, you know, you off on and it turns the mood lighting on, um, or you just go off, wait a couple seconds turning on and the regular light comes on. It actually looks really cool. Um, they really love it because you can, like the mood lighting actually, you know, it's not bright. It's not too dark. It's really nice. Um, I don't know if these TP link ones are, um, you can change color or anything like that or is it just. as RGB for the main down lights. Yeah.

Full RGB color and tunable light. So, um, yeah. So the whole design of this light looks exactly like what we ordered and we, were they TP link as well? installed.

They weren't TP link. No, I, I'd have to look it up in my, yeah, I've seen this. This is kind of appealing because like in our room or our living room, for example,

we don't really have a place where we can put like a lamp or anything like that. And so this would be appealing because then we not have the actual downlights on. Hmm. Uh, but I'm not a fan of matter of our Wi-Fi. So yeah, it's matter of Wi-Fi. And all my house is Zigby at this point for lighting because Zigby binding. So cool idea, though.

Yeah, yeah, cool idea. Interesting design. It doesn't look terrible. I mean, it doesn't look great, but it doesn't look terrible. Like, and I like the little, like the little ring around it. Like, it gives it something a little extra, right? Mm-hmm. Do you have, did you find them, Gavin?

Is that what you're? Yeah, it was a Chinese company. I guess they're Chinese. I'm making an assumption here. But Ttoll Galan, I've never heard. Took them on. Yeah, yeah. You never have. Come on. Brand name. Brand name. Oh, come on. Their family name.

Isn't a brand name? No. Never heard of them before, but the person we were installing them for really wanted these ones. So we were like, sure, okay. And we put them in and they're exactly, they look exactly the same. Like, they have the ring around it and the downlight. And you can adjust the, like, the brightness of it and stuff, I think, with a little switch. But that's pretty much all. They're not smart. Oh, yeah, I see. I see.

So these have the ring. So can you control the ring separately from the... Yeah, so you flip that by flipping the switch on and off quickly or something like that. Gotcha. Okay. And it turns on the ring instead. Interesting. So these Tibin-link ones are like this, but a little smarter.

Yeah. There's like a ton of these. It's not just the Togaloon. It's the Incar led and the Cici Sun. It's like rebranded stuff. right. I guess. I don't know.

It all looks like the same thing to me. Yeah. Oh, there's LeVitt as well, LV, all capitals, LVWIT. So there's that one, too. It's the same thing. And if you want to, you want to Chee-Bang, that's actually, they make the square ones.

You kind of go Chee-Bang, though. Ah, Che-bang's always thinking outside the box. Oh, man. All right. Well, let's move on here. We got more lighting news to get to. This is exciting here. So,

Everybody's favorite brand Govi is expanding into the premium home fixtures And they've got this new Sealing Light Ultra out I feel like we've seen this Maybe it wasn't like a CES preview or something Think it's a car Well, seen this exact one or seen something that look like this

A car one looks like this Oh you know where we saw this? We saw this at CES for sure I remember you were there Yeah I was there You remember this? Oh no I don't think so Wait here

It was a it Oh no, no, wait. It was a car, right? It was a car. No. No, it's Govi. It's a Govi booth. I had the little Govi plush thing,

the little weird light thing that looks angry. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this was at their booth. It had this thing. I didn't go there, but you did. It was like turned sideways, and they were showing, like, how you could output, like,

almost these weird video things on it. It was very cool. So this is a big, like, circular ceiling light, right? And it's got a high-resolution LED matrix on it, so it led you can basically make animations and they oh, AI driven effects, there you go. But they were doing off, like, you could put like a, it's fuzzy. It has like a flat texture.

No, that texture. What I'm looking for? Like a diffuser on it, right? So you can't, it's not giving you like a TV quality screen or anything like that. But if you, if you put like a globe, like a globe animation on your ceiling with this thing, you could tell it was a globe animation with the ceiling or something like that. So they have a picture of it here kind of with a sunset and that, yeah, a fuzzy. Sunset's pretty much what's going to look like.

But it was an interesting product. Very interesting product. And it looks like they have two versions of this. They have the Govi ceiling light and the Govi ceiling light Ultra. Yeah, I get the Ultra. Yeah, yeah, I get the Ultra. How much is the Ultra? 249.

Oh, that's a big price different. Yeah, but it's Ultra. You can put Matrix LEDs on it and AI-driven lighting effects and that kind of thing. You can look at a fuzzy television port thing. Yeah.

When you put it like that. Yeah. Watch out. This is in my kitchen now. It's an interesting product. I do remember seeing it and them showing it off. So if you ever, I have a picture of the Mona Lisa on it. If you ever wanted to know what the Mona Lisa looked like when you had cataracts, this is probably the light for you.

249 from Govi. These never sound appealing to me, though, because of the integrated LEDs. Like, obviously you needed integrated LEDs to make this product. But like at any point, if any of any of the, you. the LEDs die or they just don't want to support it anymore, your light becomes useless. Yeah, yeah. And that doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

I can deal with that for certain things, you know? But like my, just my lights on my living room, I don't think so. I mean, it's kind of like a toy, though, isn't it? Like, sure, no. It's not. Like, how much are you going to mess with this, really? $250 in the world of, like, ceiling light fixtures is nothing. Well, yeah.

It's, yeah. So for this, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, interesting. Even to have somebody like mounted this on their wall, like, and it's kind of like an artwork or something like that. So that makes a clock out of it. You make a clock out of it. Well, a fuzzy clock you can't read, but yes, you can make a clock out of it. I put a little bug animation on it so like the lights on, but it looks like there's a bug crawling around in it that drives someone nuts. This is out. It looks like you can get on Amazon. The goby ceiling night, the goby ceiling night you were talking about that's not ultra. That's $80. 80. That's not bad. That's not. That's not

It's very cheap. I don't. This may work for some people. I don't, I don't know. It's on sale right now, too, for $50 Canadian. They're claiming they have 10,080 patents on this light. And so?

You say, 10,080 plus patents. There's more than. I don't know what that means. It's a lot of patents. It doesn't know. But it gets the people going. I guess. I thought I was going to be 1080P.

Like, no, it's not 1080P. We have 1080P patents on this. It's a full TV screen. That you can't see because it's fuzzy. Oh, man. Well, there you go. And so if you want to use Gobi outside, they also have to use some new colorful outdoor lights.

And these are those fancy little string lights. You see people stringing around their house or outside on their deck or whatever. But guess what? They're powered with a six-wad solar panel with a 4,800-mmmph battery. And Gobi says it can stay fully recharge for a single day of sunlight. So, I don't know, this, this looks pretty cool too.

You can have a little fun deck party or something out there with your Gobe string lights. Yeah, I actually like this. There was another, it might have been Govi as well, but there was another smart lighting company that created some outdoor lights, but they were only controllable with, like, a very specific remote, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of being a smart home lighting company. But this is actually appealing because you could still control with an app and set up schedules and brightness and all that stuff. So this is definitely ideal because especially where people want these a lot of times

there's not actually outlet anywhere nearby like it's like above a fire pit somewhere or like you know somewhere in the yard. So it's, this is actually a good idea

and the price is not terrible. It's $100 for a 34 foot string with eight light bulbs on it. See, this is the type of smart lighting I'm fine with because you can easily replace this. Yeah.

Like you just throw it in the trash or recycle it like a responsible person. But like your light and you're light in your, like, entryway. You have to physically change that. Right.

If and when it goes bad, so. Ooh, I can put that fuzzy TV screen in my entryway. Yeah. Right above your front door. Do it. Why not? All right. TVs now, on the TV news from Vizio.

If you have a, I was just asking somebody if this brand still existed. I guess it does. But they do. And they got bought by Walmart. That's right. Walmart says some newly purchased Vizio TVs. now require a Walmart account to complete the setup and use Smart TV features.

Vizio TVs have required a Walmart have required a Walmart Vizio account since 2024, but now you've got to have the Walmart account. So like that's what happens when you get bought out. You can't have those Vizio account anymore. You can't have a Walmart account to log into your TV and use it. So there you know.

Walmart bought Vizio in 2024 for $2.3 billion in cash. So they definitely need to make that money back. somehow, and it's going to be through targeted advertising. Yeah. Use your Walmart app. Oh, you bought toilet paper two weeks ago. You probably need toilet paper again.

Let's go to just add that to your Walmart cart while we're here at the TV screen. I've had very little desire to buy one of these TVs ever. Same here. This is just getting dumb with TVs. You know, they can make us start signing up for accounts to use our TV. They already do. You're asking, yeah. That's what it sounds like.

Samsung, I think Samsung and LG, you have to make an account in order to download, like, anything on the smart apps and stuff. Oh yeah, I don't use that. Samsung for sure. Samsung's a pain in the butt. See, I don't use any of that stuff. But the day I turn on my TV and I have to relog back in because they force logged us all out or something like that will just piss me off.

Yeah. My LG TV already pisses me off. Like, I'm ready to throw that thing out, but it still looks good. Well, it's crazy. All the software on all these TVs is awful. Like Sony, I would say Sony Android TVs are the best in that regard, but it's still like an awful mess. We just need a dumb TV.

Just give us a. We just want a TV. The monitor. And sell us the box, you know, like as the add-on to these TVs or something. Yeah. Well, here's some software that does work. Evidently, Walmart is announcing this week that VizioOS will show ads for beauty brand, L'OLE, and connect to Walmarts and other companies' product pages. So there you go.

Nice. They got that working. Ads that I have no desire to see. Well, I mean, you'll get them anyway. It doesn't matter. Great. That's not what I want a TV for. All right.

Oh, here's an interesting product. I think everybody, everybody, everybody wants one of these things, I think. Like, do you have a, do you want a lazy boy recliner? Do you want speakers? Yeah. Well, how about you get clip speakers shoved into your lazy boy recliner? Well, that's, that's exactly what the mad scientists over at lazy boy have done. They have, they're releasing this audio looks, audio looks brand of seeds that have speakers integrated into the headrest and a subwifor hidden.

in the base, so you get the little butt rumbles as well. Lazy Boy says the furniture can be used as either part of a larger surround setup or connect wirelessly to your phones and tablets. So there you go. There you go. A built-in butt shaker with TV, it's ready for your Adobe Atmos and all that good stuff. You know, we talked, we talked, we talked about that love sack couch way back. We had that love, love couch.

I mean, this, this is the next best thing. you know, maybe, maybe for a single setup, I guess. I love chair. Yeah, love chair. Just for yourself. Self love, yeah. Self care, self-care chair. Yeah.

I can't imagine what this thing is going to cost. I mean, lazy boy stuff is expensive anyway. I can't imagine what it's going to cost when they put five, like three speakers into it. So I'm trying to see if we can find it. Yeah, I don't think they've actually announced pricing as far as I can tell. I really like the idea. I just don't like the execution. Like, I feel like they're limiting themselves to whoever wants the clips, like,

this sound system. Well, it's part of, it's Bluetooth, so you can just Bluetooth it to whatever, but yeah. Yeah, but using Bluetooth with what you're watching on TV, it's not going to sync properly, is it? Sure. You know? Yeah, I should have just like air fire or something. Well, yeah, I had enough problems even get my Sonos to sink properly

sometimes. This is just going to be worse. There's a whole other issue. But they should have, you know, if they have a Sonos version of this chair, but then how would it integrate into your home setup? I don't know. It would actually come up with its own app because that's what Sonos does these days. Yeah, probably.

And it wouldn't work. Yeah. This is one of those things I can definitely see selling a lot of. I'm just curious of price. As somebody who did furniture repair for lazy boy, I would say don't buy lazy boy, but they are very low quality and a lot of money. Yeah, they look expensive here. I'm just trying to figure out, yeah, there's no indication on how much these are going to be.

Maybe we can get in touch with them and get you guys some review units. Yeah, go ahead and send me one. I'll need two. One for upstairs, one for downstairs. They're both for me. All right. Well, let's move on here. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found over on our show notes over at Hometech.fm slash 572.

Nothing in the mailbox this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And this is an interesting little pick from Morton over in the Slack chat. I posted this earlier today. This is called Release Room Relay version 1.04. Okay. So room relay is a product or a open source software, I guess, that can connect your Windows, like the output of a Windows audio to your Sonos. And it can play whatever you're playing, like as an output on your Windows machine out to the,

it's your Sonos. So I guess they have released this now. It looks like a pretty cool product or piece of software. Since I don't use Windows, it's completely useless for me. But, you know, with AI, maybe they'll release it for Mac or something one of these days. They'll just like, hey, port this to Mac and then you'll get the Mac version. It seems kind of cool, though. Gavin, have you, did you try this?

Yeah, I actually gave it a shot today. They have a portable version, which was just easy. You just ran it. Interface was a little confusing, but once I figured it all out, it worked really well to send the audio to my speakers. Right? So I can't complain about that. What I can complain of, it wasn't in sync. Wait, so it has between your zones, the audio wasn't in sync?

No, no, no. Like, I was watching a video on my computer. Oh, yeah. And I wanted the audio to come out through the speakers, and they weren't in sync at all. It's a few seconds behind. So I wish they could find a way to sync it or, you know, that sounds like something like Sendspin, the home assistant. Remember Home Assistant, they introduced this protocol keeping music audio in sync called Senspin. I wonder if they could do something similar like this.

and release that so I can then, you know, play audio from my PC to my sonal speakers and they'll be in sync. That would be nice. Yeah, it's not intended for low latency gaming or video sync. Yeah. Yeah. Not at all. Most things aren't. But if you're just listening to something on your computer and you want to send it around the house, this is an easy option of doing it.

It's very easy to do. It says, yeah, several seconds of buffering for latency. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. It works well, too, because it didn't skip or anything. It was just playing, you know, all my speakers really well. Yeah, that's, in general, the wireless platforms I've seen had this problem. And I guess like Airplay works a little bit differently where it will kind of like

sync the video that you're watching, like the beginning of it to whatever, it's spitting out. So like, in theory, the video you're seeing should impact the speakers at the time you're seeing the video. I don't know. I've had, there was something a years ago that you could do this with Sonos and it was kind of like the same thing where you just have this delay or whatever, but it's streaming audio, I guess.

Like it's got a buffer somewhere, so it's going to happen. Yeah, cool, cool project. Interface is nice and clean. That's probably the cleanest looking interface I've ever seen for a Windows application. So good job, guys. That's pretty good. Feel like he just knocked the Windows applications right there.

I mean, you know, you gave it a compliment and an insult at the same time. It doesn't even look native to Windows, but, you know, it's the cleanest interface I've seen. Thanks. Get a design system, guys. Come on. You can do it. All right.

Let's move on here. If you have any feedback, questions, ideas for the show or picks of the week, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.com. Or head on over to hometech.com slash feedback and fill out the online form. All right. Project IDs, but first, we've got some home assistant updates. I probably have to go run one. or two. But UBSS.S. is joining the Works for Home Assistant. They do a bunch of

they manufacture Zygby devices in a German manufacturer over there. So in Dusseldorf. So there you go. They've got Zygby products. Let's see. They have an H-1 heating device. It clips on the existing heater radiators and runs on AA batteries. So probably pretty popular over there because they have those types of heaters. You guys don't have any of those heaters. Do you need little steam things? No. No. All right. Well, good for them. They're now works with Home Assistance Certified. And, Gavin, you put this in here. I'm not buying this, but it looks interesting. It is an unraid, a piece of Unraid news called the X-15. And it is a collaboration with 45 Home Lab. And it's called

the Unraid signature series starting at $3,000. Oh, I wanted to be the one to drop the price. Oh, well, I mean, it could be more expensive, I'm sure. Like, definitely. could be more expensive than that. So this is, this is just basically hardware, right? Like, they have made specific hardware to be unraged compatible. Yeah, 45 drives, they've been known in the home lab space for a number of years now, actually. And they made, they make these rack mountable, like, yeah, like cases, basically, right? But they put a lot of engineering behind the case for cooling and sound and stuff like that. And they got pretty popular with the various YouTube. Oh, right?

These, yeah, okay, so these are the guys that make the big giant case where you just load all the hard drives into it. Yeah, you can, they have different size cases and stuff. So they did a collaboration with Unraid and made a specific one for Unraid. And it's big news and everything. They came out with the announcement. It comes with a full Unrated license and everything like that, which really shouldn't matter at this price. But I was looking at the hardware for it. It came with a nice set of hardware.

So it's got like an I7, the 1400 series. So I think that's like 20 core CPU and stuff like that, right? So it's got some nice hardware behind it. But I don't know who they're marketing this at because I feel like at this price, you can build your own system for cheaper. Well, you can always do that. I mean, you can always be cheaper. No, but like much cheaper, much cheaper, though.

Like this thing, it looks nice and everything, but I don't know, like, I would be able to justify spending $3,000 on this. I don't know. I don't know what makes it worth $3,000. I mean, it's people like me that, like, run home assistant, but I don't want to learn all the intricate details of home assistant. You know what I mean? It's like, there's people out there that want to use this stuff. You're still going to have to learn that stuff. You're still, that's a certain point.

But if you don't care about the hardware side of it, then you don't necessarily have to learn about the hardware if you get this. It's the same with like, it's the same concept with home assistant. Like, you can sit there and build your own. own, you know, micro PC with home assistant on it and add your own Zigby Hub and all this other stuff, or you can just buy the Home Assistant Green. And with the Home Assistant Green, you still have to load Home Assistant though and build it. Yeah, that's a silly thing. I'm sure they do that for some silly reason.

But you don't have to worry about the hardware, though. So it's less hassle to get into. But do you? Because you still have to buy the controllers and understand the controller and stuff like that for like the Z wave and stuff like that too, right? You still got to buy the hard drives for this one. So that's $3,000 is nothing. That's a drop in the bucket for which you're going to spend on data.

Storage. Exactly. That $3,000 doesn't even include hard drives. It's just memory in the CPU and... That's like one hard drive. The CPU, yeah. It's one hard drive. And a case.

That's all in a license, right? At this point, like, I just feel that it's really overpriced for what it is. I'm obviously not their target market. And I honestly feel like, People like, there are cheaper options out there, much cheaper. If you don't even want to deal with hardware and stuff, you could get like a Dell server and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, there's cheaper, but I mean, this is a nice looking like rack mountable case that holds, what, 15 hard drives? What is this thing called?

Yeah, but you're still going to have to know what hardware you're messing with because you're going to have to know what drives you put in there and what order they are and setting up cash drives versus the pool drives and all the fun. stuff. You're still going to have to play with that stuff. This is just pre-built for you for $3,000. And that's US. So it hurts even more when I think the comedian price. Import duties, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like, I could see this selling because like if you don't want to track all this stuff down, like here's one place you can just buy it. And it all comes in a box. And you just add your drives. Like now you can buy this and then maybe one small hard drive. And then you can start there. And then as you, but that's, that's not my argument. My argument isn't like, these things aren't good, right? You don't think any of this is good? I think it's great.

I think it's a great system, right? Like, I think it's a nice setup. My argument is, is it $3,000 good, right? Like, are you good, if you wanted to, would you spend $3,000 on this, or would you go with Synology or something like that? I wouldn't do a Synology. I mean, if Synology is going to be about the same price for this, right? It's going to be at least this for a 15-based Synology that's recommendable,

maybe even more. So I think it's probably a pretty good price. Plus, Synology's going to, well, I guess they've gotten better on the processor, but it's not like,

this is a gigabyte motherboard. It's not like it's un, you can add PCI cards to it. Like it's not. Exactly. Yeah. It's upgradable. Like, this is a 16 base sonology

rack mounted, $3,800. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's in line. Okay. But with Synology, you literally get everything.

So you don't have to worry about that. Mine is the hard drives. I'm thinking of the average, The average home user, you know? Like somebody, if somebody. This is not for the average home user. This is, well, even like the above average home user, $3,000. Well, you get to a point where you're just, you, I look at this and I'm like, I can, I know enough about the hardware that I can find it cheaper.

I can get it cheaper. Sure. You can always do that. And when I say cheaper, I'm saying half the price or less, right? Like my current setup didn't cost me anywhere close to half of this. And it's even more powerful. Well, I wouldn't say speed-wise, but... You're not going to find a 15-bay case with...

Well, as a two-piece, I have a 16-bay driver array, and I have my server underneath it. So it's moving the gold post. Yeah. But that's a compromise that saves me $1,500. I didn't even pay that much for this. I probably spent under $1,000 for that hardware, and I got more, right?

They're just different things. You can buy the same case for $1,000, it looks like. Just empty. the case in the back plane. The $1,000. See, it's got a backplane in. How nice is this? This is really nice, Gavin.

I don't know why you're... No, no, it's... I'm just saying it's a nice... I'm not saying it's not bad hardware. Stop talking bad about Unraid. Yeah, I'm saying the hardware and the software and everything is great. I'm just saying the price seems a little high, right? And I just think it's overpriced for one.

Yeah, but you're never going to buy this anyway, so... I know I'm not going to buy it because it's overpriced. If they came in at $1,500... If they came in at 1,500, I would probably say. Even if they made this $1,000, you probably still wouldn't buy it because you want to build your own thing and customize it. It is $1,000. No, but this is built. This is customizable.

This is customizable. But even if they came in, they said it was $1,500. I would probably buy it at that point for myself because I know I could put GPUs in here and customize it and do more things with it, right? And it holds 15 drives and it's in one unit. And I'll be like, okay, $1,500, that makes more sense. Right? $3,000. At that point, you know, if somebody's

willing to drop $3,000 on it, they'll also be smart enough to know we could get something much cheaper, pretty much more powerful or close to, and save a lot of money. I just think it's overpriced. I think it's a great system. I just think it's too much money.

That's my argument. Well, because you're saying, keep in mind, 3,000 U.S., that's like four to five Canadians, you know, and that that price, you know, Yeah. You know, it's a significant amount of money for what it is. I can understand that.

I will, so like, you can buy, you can already buy this H-152.0, the storage server already for $3,000, fully built, burned in, and tested. Let's say, it's $3,000 U.S. I don't know what it is for Canadians. But if you just want it, like, and I think that's probably a pretty good start. If you think $3,000 is expensive, I don't know, you can buy the $1,000 case, because that's pretty much $1,000 of the $3,000 is the case. The rest is going to be the motherboard, CPU, backplane, heat, you know, all that stuff,

power supply, all that stuff put together, right? And that will add up, I admit. All that does add up. And maybe, you know, I'm not being fair by comparing it to, like, being a smart shopper and looking for things on marketplace and comparing it to that, right? Like, maybe that's not a fair comparison. I should be comparing it to new hardware probably. It's the AMD epics, not 10-year-old servers that we get for 200 bucks off.

Exactly. But that, again, is my argument is like a home laber, you know, are they willing to drop this much money on that? I don't think this is for whole labors, though. This is like a small business or something like that. Okay, so you think this is targeted at small businesses that will run a high rate? I mean, somebody that's going to spend $3,000 on that. They're either a small business or they're like a very heavy power user. Yeah, I would say that.

Yeah. And even the $1,000, like the, I guess it comes with the chassis and the back plane, right? Like, I could, I don't, I didn't pay $1,000 for my case. I paid a few hundred dollars for my case and I thought it was, you know, way too much. But now knowing what I know, I really wish I had this case because this case is really nice. Yeah, I mean, 15 base is a lot. It's a lot. It's all cooled and everything.

It's got a back plane. You just snap things down into. I mean, this is done right. mine is kind of like a home theater PC type thing hooked up and got a bunch of drive shoved into it and kind of in weird ways, right? So like this, this is really nice. Like, is it $1,000 nice? I don't know, but that's how much stuff rack mount stuff costs. And, you know, it's, yeah.

When you get into rack mount, I learned that things get more expensive to. They like to add numbers. For some reason, yeah. Don't know why, but they like to add for some reason rack mount's more expensive. They figure if you can afford four screws to drill it into a rack, then you can afford the extra money or something. I don't know. Exactly.

Well, X-15, it's coming out. You can get that for $3,000. Or you can just go ahead and get the one now, the other one that's not white. No, it's white. They have white and black for the X-15, and then for the, what is it, the H-15? I already lost the page on it. That one, yes, H-L-15, that one you can get for $3,000. Burned in, ready to go, or $1,000, roughly.

empty so let's move on we we've got we've got um interesting i always like tools i guess uh this is android only so and it also works for thread and that's i don't have any thread devices in my house but if you did have thread devices and you did have an android boy uh here's your lucky day if your thread devices are giving you problems uh there is a new app called the thread network diagnosis, it's aimed at developers, researchers, and enthusiasts who want to inspect the thread network. You can use an Android phone to do real-time device discovery and show connectivity details, including integration with capable, compatible border routers and all that good stuff. If you ever want to look deep into the thread network and see what's going on, this is a tool for that.

And I'm always happy to see tools. So, and it was made by the thread group too. So first party app for the, for diagnosing thread networks. Good stuff. I feel like they were listening to us. Yeah, we want tools. We like tools. Yeah.

We need tools to diagnose this, the issues you are having with thread and stuff, right? But I also think once you get to this point, you've just duplicated another, what we already had out there, too. We had problems with Z-Wave and ZigB. We had tools to help us visualize and troubleshoot it and stuff. to now we have a new network that has its own set of problems that we need tools to diagnose as well, too, right? You're going to need the tools either way. So, like, yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter. Like, the good thing is, is that this exists now. And if you're having, like, some weird issues or,

you know, edge cases, it looks, this is kind of interesting how they have it where you can, like, share the data. You can, like, anonymize the data. It replaces all your Mac addresses and replaces all your, like, sensitive information. So you can, like, post it on a forum, somewhere and ask, you know, for help. So that's a smart idea. Smart stuff here. I like it. If only is available on iOS,

because I don't have an Android device. Probably, probably can't do the discovery stuff that you're in deep network diagnostics that you could do with the thread network on it. Yeah, that's not true. To lock down for Apple's taste. And in Home Assistant, um, I know this is more for just troubleshooting it in general. Um, but Home Assistant, you can also view your thread network to if you ever wanted to. They have that built in as well.

Yep. And if you're on iOS, you can use that. Yeah, exactly. Because it's built right into the app. So there you go. I don't like their example of the visualizations. Like, what am I looking at? This is like a Jackson Pollock painting or something. We don't need to see this, like, just green lions going everywhere. This is dumb. So, yeah, that's not helpful. But, you know, finding bad connections between devices, that would be helpful. So anyway, tool, there you go.

Projects. We got projects to do update. Who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? Gavin, you're on here. Sure, I'll go first. This week, I've been playing with the Akara P-100 sensor. I don't know if you guys heard about this. You should have.

We saw that. I think we talked about it. C-S. Yeah, I think we talked about it. But it finally got released and, you know, what is it again? The P-100 multi-sensor, right? So basically this is a single little square box,

takes a little single battery. it's Zygby or thread. Um, and it measures things like orientation, movement, fall, vibration, tilt, even triple tapping. Oh, this is one for the fish food. The hardware. Yeah. So you can, you know, like, I like one of their examples as they attach it to grandma's

wheelchair. So if she ever falls over, you'll get notified because the tilt. Um, this is actually pretty cool sensor, um, for what it is. Um, you can put it on your window, uh, and it will tell you if the windows open or close, not based like a regular contact sensor, but based on the angle of it, right? Like the orientation. So you'll actually know, you know, if your windows, not just locked, but like opened, which is pretty cool. Um, there's a lot of little ideas people are using this for like putting in your mailbox or putting it on your washing machine or, you know, on grandma's chair.

You put it on the windows and the walls. Yeah, stuff like that. I mean, they should come out with a little necklace for it or a little land yard so that you could put around mom. And just in case she trips and falls, you'll get a notification, you know, that type of thing. You know, just throw a whole threat. Uh, then, then I'll hit the battery and, you know, the stuff.

No, there's not much room. They make their devices really tight inside. They're so small. Just use the 3M tapes to get on air. It'd be all right. But no, I've been playing around. It's, I think I said it's a Zigby or Thread. Uh, it was there, there's stuff these days have gotten

really easy and just work. Like when you're adding it, the first time you add it, it says, what protocol do you want to use? And usually it's thread by default and you choose Zigby and then it has a flash of firmware and then you're now on Zigby and that adds it. And stuff just works. They've been really good lately.

So if you're looking for something like this, I can recommend it. If you have a case for it, don't buy it and try and find a problem to solve. Have a problem first, then buy it. I am sorry. I have like to the windows, to the walls, to Grandma trips and falls on my head. I just can't.

I can't. It's like, that's an AI song if I've ever heard one. Stuck in my head, yeah. You got to say it. You got to make a song over that. All right. All right.

What else you got going on? You got, you got, it was pretty much it for the week, you know. Like, it was tax week, so I did my taxes. I just want to say, I've been doing taxes for a long time. And this year was the easiest. I've ever had what taxes here. Um, it went through quickly.

It downloads like, I don't know, you guys get T4s down there. I don't think so. You have something different down there, right? But we get our T4 and I used to have to go through each box with a number and type in the value and you spent like hours just doing that with all these forms. Now it just connects to the government site downloads all the forms, fills it all in for you. And then all the extra forms you have, you figure out it's so nice now. See, they don't want, they don't want that.

basically the government knows every penny you've made already. They know our tax bill. We just have to pay it. But they make us go through this step of filling out these useless forms and paying for these companies to do it for us because they lobby to shut that type of system down that you're describing. So, yeah, we can't have nice things and just pay the bill that we should pay. Hey, the easiest thing I found about taxes is if you hire an accountant person or a CPA to do your taxes every year. and you just say, hey, can you just do my taxes? What they do for you is they just, at the beginning of April,

they're like, they're going to be late. And they just file the late thing, and you got until October. That's what mine does every year, automatically. Woo-hoo! She's like, I went ahead and just filed for an extension. You could just, we could just do them whenever. Just do whatever, yeah. It works for me.

I don't even care. Yeah, for some reason, like, when I went to do my taxes, I used to have an account to do it, and then with the whole work from home, thing now, all of a sudden you go to account it, and it's like eight times the price for them to do it. I'm like, what? It's one extra form. And they're like, oh, no, now it's considered a business, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, yeah, so I just do it myself and I pay like 30 bucks to file my own taxes.

And I'm good like that. Like, it's so easy now. Mine are simple. The only problem I have is when you brag about how easy it was, everyone wants you to do their taxes now for them, too. So I had to do my moms and my sisters. and so I just had to tell somebody. I had a good time doing my taxes this year. All right.

Yeah, when I met my current bookkeeper, when I had my initial appointment with her, I was like, look, I don't care about taxes, and I just want you to do everything related to taxes. And she was like, okay, here's the bill. And I was like, deal. This year she raised prices on me. She raised prices $25.

She's like, I have to raise prices. I'm really sorry. And I was like, oh, how much you're going to charge now? She's like, well, you were paying $200 a month. for my services. Now you're going to pay $2.25. And I was like, that is so worth it. Yeah.

I don't care about any of those. It's pretty much worth it to have them file for you because you're going to forget and don't have time to deal with this. And, yeah. And they know all the loopholes and all that crap. I mean, they just, they know everything. So I'll just. Yeah.

When you get more complicated, when you get more complicated with the businesses and stuff like that, it's worth it. Yeah. Because at that point, they can work out, like, certain things. But my situation is so simple. that like it's not worth paying somebody to do it, I'll just do it myself. Yeah, that's the thing.

I got two businesses I got to do taxes for. Yeah. You. Yeah, I messed up last year. I was working as a contractor for half the year. So, whoa, that's gonna be fun. You know,

a billion dollars now. I love that contract just to charge a ton of money. Like when I learned that I was self-employed and I got self-employed taxes, my, my current tax person at the time, it's like, oh yeah, there's this fee because you're self-employed.

And I was like, for what? And he's like, yeah, just because you're self-employed. You know, you don't have health insurance, any of the other benefits of being employed, but you've got to pay this extra tax.

Exactly. Yeah, it's total something. Wow. Encouraging the business and small family business. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I wasn't ranting about taxes. I just wanted to say it's so nice, no, so much nicer now. Sorry, we're American.

Yeah. It's just what we do. You get mad about it. We throw tea in the Harvard. It's really weird. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why we do that. That's what we do.

But that wraps up my week. All right, all right. Let's see. TJ, what do you got going on? Yeah, for my project, I got a lot of stuff going on. So it's, you know,

it's getting to be weather time, you know? Weather time? It's nice out. Oh, okay. We got, technically we can start planning stuff the weekend of Mother's Day,

which I think is May 10th, if I remember correctly. So, you know, we have like two weeks, less than two weeks. Actually, when we go to Canada is when we can plant stuff. So we're missing out on planning stuff

so we can go to Canada. But that's fine. We're going out with Gavin. Gavin doesn't know what we're doing yet. I mean, he keeps asking me what we're doing. And I was like, I literally come up to see. You know, I had to have a plan.

I'm going to call up Rohan and, you know, Apollo guys will be here and, you know, we'll figure out something. There's always something going on. This whole arrangement, sorry, I just want everybody to know, this whole arrangement started because I offered to come up to Gavin's house to run some wires, right? And so we've been talking about this for, you know, several, I think. We've been talking about for like a year now, I think. I just wanted you to come see Toronto. It was supposed to be last year, I think, is actually when we were supposed to do it. And then, you know, America did a thing where it went crazy.

So that didn't happen. And so this year we finally decided to go. We're going to go up to Gavin's house, run some wires, so we can install some cameras. This guy last week or the week before told me he hasn't even bought any cameras yet. He has a doorbell. He has a doorbell. He wants me to install. So I'm going to run wires.

I'm not even going to install cameras, which I think is like a slap in the face, to be honest, because I don't want to just run wire. I don't want to install cameras. I want Gavin to spend money. And then this week, he was like, what are you going to do when you're here? And I was like, like, we're hanging out of your house. What do you mean? He's like, well, I mean, you could go to the city and do all this stuff.

And I don't even want to go to the city because he's talking about all this crime. People are stealing maple trees out of people's yards and like cars and stuff out of driveways and like going in their house and taking their car keys. Like it's like, I don't even want to leave your house anyway. But now he's like, he's like, well, I mean, I don't want you to work the whole time you're there, even though that's why we're going up. I don't understand this whole trip to Canada. I thought you were coming to enjoy the city, you know? This is when you relax a little, yeah. Yeah.

Hang out with some fentanyl zombies. She knows, you know. We have tons of those. I don't realize that it's going to be in Philadelphia. We have restaurants lined up. We'll take you to, you know, like any cuisine. So basically, we're not going to work anymore. I'm literally not going to run any cables in Gavin's house.

No, no, at least my doorbell. We're done. No wires, I hear. And Gavin has to plan out what we're doing. So he has... Okay, okay. I'll buy one expensive camera for you. He has nine days from when we're talking about this right now.

So whenever you get the show, it'll be like six days, I think. maybe five days. But you have nine days to figure out what we're doing when we come to Canada, Gavin. I'll buy one expensive camera to let you. You better buy it. I don't know which one yet. So you'll have to pick out which one. I can just buy it for you too and save you like $3,000.

Well, hold on a minute. Save me $3,000 off of how many thousands of dollars? No, but I want, you know, just to give you, I want a really nice one for my driveway. Yeah. To cover my driveway. I want to catch those guys in full, like. You need an AI industrial I don't know.

Well, it has to be, I wanted to be Unify because then it works with my system. And you don't want to see them. Hey. You need this G6 ProTurt or a G6Ptze. All right, I looked it up. G6PTZ.

Anyway, this isn't about you. This is my projects, but I just wanted to ran about Gavin because Gavin doesn't know why we're coming to Canada, I guess. But anyway. I had to hang out. That isn't why we're coming to Canada. I don't want to come hang out with you.

I want to come hanging out with Rose. I mean, she's so much nicer. Oh. Yeah. You don't know her. And then I got started on some more garden space this week. We filed a permit to change our front yard into a pollinator garden. And I submitted the request for the whole yard, which is like 1,800 square feet.

We got approved. I said they're like, I don't think they actually have any idea what's going on with it. they passed the legislation last year and then like this year they actually implemented it and they said you had to have like you know you had to have a layout and a diagram of what all these plants are and so I just had my friend

Claude come up with an AI Oh this is the one with the little baby Yeah yeah It's blowing in the wind made literally zero sense I'm just gonna throw it out there I literally made no sense I had Claude sorted by height And so the back of the back of the yard

Was like all the tall plants And as you got closer to the sidewalk As all the short plants literally made no sense and they approved it. They look at it or they just like, I don't think they did, to be honest, Seth. They just approved it. Nobody asked me any questions or anything like that, you know.

It did make any sense. But this week I started on the Pollinator Garden. We'll throw a couple pictures. There's a lot of pictures. But we'll throw a couple there, maybe like a before and after. But basically I just cut the grass down super low. And then I used all the boxes I've been saving from work, all my Sony TV boxes, my Sony and speaker boxes.

my sonos, my ubiquity, my true cable boxes, all the boxes I've been saving for work. I had so many. And I put that on top of the grass to smother the grass and then I put compost and then seeds and then new plants there. So it's quite a big transformation. Literally people keep stopping by the house just to look at it.

Probably because it partially looks like crap. I was just to say, like, if you know what this looks like, maybe we'll figure out, put a picture on the episode here. Like, you posted the, picture of this and I mean I had to look at it twice. I'm like, what am I looking at? Because of your cardboard constructions that you had. Yeah. Yeah. It was very, very interesting. So. Yeah. So the goal is to get rid of grass and turn it into like a pollinator garden. And so that way, you know, the bird or the, not the birds. That'd be kind of weird. The butterflies and the bees can use

it to, you know, make whatever they need to do to live. I mean, there's, there's, okay. I'll tell you, about you later. About the birds and the bees. I think I know about that. Oh, okay, okay. You can see. All right. I just didn't want to see your explanation. Family show.

But yeah, it's literally like a whole big section of my yard. It's half my yard, basically. So it is quite the difference between everybody else's yard. And right now it looks like a mess because it's just like dirt on the sidewalk and everything. You know, it's fresh. It'll look like crap for like six months or a year. And then it should look pretty normal after that. So it looks something now.

It's interesting. It's very interesting. Yeah, it is interesting. I tried to use my G6 PTZ, my ubiquity camera, to actually record the process because it's on the front corner of the house. And I was like, you know, it's just sitting there. I could just zoom it in on the spot and make it watch me.

And then I can do a time lapse. But even with my auto home off, my auto repositioning, it would just constantly like reset the view. And so I would like zoom in on the spot that we're working on. And then all of a sudden it would just zoom back out and be like, nope, going back to my home position, even though that's turned off. So I don't have a good time lapse video of it, unfortunately.

Isn't that the camera you just tried to sell me? No, the G6 PCZ? Yeah, but it's like all the rusty ubiquity stuff. There's just little bugs and stuff you got to deal with. You're already used to it. Yeah, big time. But, I mean, it did the job that I didn't want it to do and it followed me around the whole time, which is not what you want when you want to see the progress of something.

Yeah, no, it doesn't, it doesn't. You want it to stay fixed. Right, wherever you told it to go. That's usually what you wanted to do. do. But continue with the garden stuff, I have started automating my garden watering. So, you know, I got the irrigation lines dug in a couple of weeks ago. I got the controller hooked up. Everything seems to be working good. But now I need to actually work on the automation portion of it. And so I've started that process instead of manually watering everything now, which is really nice.

So I have it set up now to where basically it waters the trees two times a day right now because a lot of the trees are brand new. so they need a lot of watering. And they're watering twice a day now, unless it's rained in the past 24 hours. So I'm slowly incorporating, you know, the conditionals. I don't want to put too many in there because I don't want it to like break

for some random reason. So I'm trying to get that set up now. So that's, that's been going good. At least I don't have to immediately water anything now. That isn't brand new. We're in a drought. So I'm still having water.

I kind of don't want to water, but I'm trying to also save the grass. Or what is the remaining of the grass? So, yeah. Can we wait till rainy season actually yet? It's, uh, yeah, we haven't got like any rain yet. It's super weird. It's rained, I mean, like a couple times a week or something like that,

but it's usually downpouring all the time in the spring. So it's a very strange thing. And this week, I decided to spend some money. I bought a DJI, uh, Osmo Pocket 3. Um, this is a camera. I think a lot of the content creators use for like mobile content creation. Uh, this is pretty sweet. It's a gimbal camera.

Um, and so it can, it's, it's, can follow you around or you can walk around and it keeps the, uh, the video without shaking around everywhere. Uh, it's very small. I mean, it's like a little bit of a long device, uh, but you can hold it pretty easily. Uh, and the camera quality is amazing on it. Um, it's, it's a very good camera. It was $500 from Best Buy. Um, well worth it. The reason I actually bought it is because I joined my local chamber of commerce here in Reynoldsburg as a board member. Um, and I started going around doing some interviews with business owners and stuff like that. So I needed something. I was using my phone,

but I just hate using my phone for that kind of stuff. I want a dedicated device with this own storage and everything like that. So I bought this. It is fantastic. If you're thinking about buying a mobile camera like this where you just want to record some content, like maybe it's a kid's sports game or you want to record yourself at work or something like that. I think this is honestly, for $500, this is so much better than like an Insta 360 or a GoPro or something like that. Obviously depending on what you're doing. But it's a fantastic device for the price. I was trying to find a used one,

but it's kind of like Sonos before Sonos went to crap, where you can find a use one, but it's like $50 off. So there was not a lot of savings with used ones. I think it's also relatively new, which probably doesn't help. So I just decided to buy a brand new,

fantastic device, though. Very nice. Very nice. I'll bring it to Canada. We'll make some videos in Canada. You get stolen. I probably will, honestly. No, no, no.

I already have a, so I'll let you keep that one. Okay. You have one of these? I have the Insta 361 though. Oh, yeah. But that's not the one I have is not the one with the integrated camera. It's the one where you put your cell phone on it.

And it does things like follow you around and all that other fun stuff. So I have one of those two. It's very heavy because my phone's heavy. Yeah. And I think you have like the one I had to, you had to like take it out of your phone case. It works through my phone case, but I have a thinner phone case too, right? But it's actually pretty cool because. you could set it up and it will follow you around.

It will take a 360 picture, stuff like that. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, they're amazing devices, honestly. So especially the, the cell phone gimbal ones are relatively inexpensive compared to this. You know, I think I have one. I don't remember which brand. It was like $100 to $200. So, you know, less than half the price, which is nice.

That's all my projects, though. Seth, what you got going on? Oh, man. Well, we didn't, we didn't get a show last week because I was traveling and I went to the West Coast in L.A., and that's three hours away, and the timing just wasn't going to line up for us to do this show and record to, like, crazy...

Yeah, we didn't start until 10 o'clock tonight. We wouldn't start until 1 or 2, and it wouldn't start at all at that point. We were looking for Gavin a Home, I think, is what we were doing earlier. But, yeah, yeah, that would not have gone over well. T. T.J. would have been sleeping, I think. But so we skipped last week.

I was at DMF at the office doing things there, like meeting people and having meetings and stuff in the office, rather than meetings on teams and that kind of thing. So got some office time. When I got there on Sunday, and then Monday night, somewhere around, I guess, 8 p.m. here. So it would have been like right when I was getting off and I was trying to like get back into the hotel room,

I started getting frantic calls. Oh, no, something's happened. And I pick up, and my wife's like, yeah, there's something in the dryer vent thing. I'm like, oh, that's weird. How did something get in there? She's like, well, I went outside and looked, and there's no flapper thing on the ancient dryer flapper thing that lives outside. I'm like, oh, well, that's probably how it crawled in there? That's not good.

It shouldn't, it's something shouldn't be in there. You should get it out. And she's like, well, how am I going to get it out? And I was like, well, the thing is it's hooked up to a dryer. So you just got to turn it on. it'll go away, whatever it is. And so this thing is like scratching around and skittering and stuff, like making all these noises inside.

She's freaking wrong. My daughter thinks something's going to chew through and give her rabies. I don't know. I heard her crying about that on the phone before my wife hung up and convinced her to push the button on the dryer while she watched and saw if anything came out. And sure enough, a big little possum came lumbering out and of a four-inch dryer hole. I don't know how it managed to do that. Yeah.

That'd be scary too. Yeah, it crawled out. And she's like, well, what do I do now that I know that it's gone? I'm like, well, just shove a towel into it. And then don't use the dryer when I get home. We'll figure it out. So I had that basically Monday. And she's like, well, what if something's still in there?

And I'm like, well, it's cooked now. You don't have to worry about it. It's done. So, you know, you can, you don't have to worry about whatever. She's like, what if it was having babies? And I'm like, oh, well, the babies probably aren't completely cooked. but you know, you'll find out. And sure enough, Wednesday rolls around,

and I get another call about how bad it smells within the house. I guess opening the dryer triggered a bunch of scent to come out of the dryer. It was awful. And she got her dad to come over and kind of help to symbol the washer and dryer room area. And they figured out it was a dead frog in there. Not only was there a migrating opossum or something. something like that. There was a dead frog. And so the frog came out. The smelly tubes went out. And all was well with the house until I got home. After taking the red eye back on Saturday,

I got to do dryer vent work and sheet metal work. So lots of fun. I actually got it done. And a fairly decent amount of time, it only took me two trips to Home Depot because I bought like a, you know those flex tube things that you normally have like the, that's what was hooked up behind the dryer that they threw away. And I was like, well, I was just get a new one. and I like started messing with that. And of course it like just starts unraveling. And I'm like, nope, I can't handle this. This is not cool.

So I went and I got the actual sheet metal and I like piped it in and did all the piping and hooked it all up. So it's like a proper sheet metal pipe that goes basically in the wall all the way underneath the dryer and goes into there. So instead of doing any smart home related stuff, I was I was messing around with the dryer. But guys, I did get something on Monday, I guess. I got a notification saying FedEx was going to drop off a box. And I'm like, what could FedEx possibly be driving off? I didn't order anything. Well, I guess I did order something at some point in time in the past.

I ordered the Santitron, this remote thing here. I guess it's a home assistant remote, turns out. And I'm supposed to put something on a dashboard for it to show up here. This thing is so ugly. Is this like, it looks like a knockoff RTI remote? It's not that big. No, no. It's closer.

Put it up next to your face. I want to see how big is next to your face. I guess that's not that big. Yeah, it's not terrible. It's, it's in line, about the same size of the control for Neo remotes, maybe a little bit bigger than those. The screen's definitely a little bit larger, and it's got IR on it, which is kind of nice.

I guess I can shoot IR now that Home Assistant has an error, something. I don't know. It's got a bunch of features. I haven't looked into it because I barely even opened it out of this box this week. And I guess there's some kind of hacks and stuff. I was just going through the documentation to kind of see what all I'm supposed to do here to get this going. But there's some kind of Ross card, I guess, that I'm supposed to install and put buttons on a dashboard. So that's my next task is to edit a dashboard and add a button, a custom Ross card button.

So does it control TVs? It says it does? maybe there's a TV card I wonder what that does oh yeah look it does all that oh and I can select the entity oh interesting I don't I have to figure this out there's a lot of like weird things here it looks like there other other remotes they had on their website also have like control four drivers and Crestron drivers so if you're tired of those remotes maybe pick one of these up I don't know how it works it seems to connect to your Wi-Fi and but we'll see how well it works if I can integrate it with home assistant or control four I'll give it a shot and report back and

see how it works, though. It is a Sanytron. Sanytron. Is that their Astreon? Astreon, yeah, that's what it is. Astreon. A pretty good price for that, 145. Yeah, not terrible. Yeah, that's, can't complain. Compared to what other people are putting out,

that's a pretty good price. Yeah, it's, it has a little like Android, of course, Android interface to it. I think you can get into the Android area by pressing and holding parts of the screen or tapping a bunch of times. I don't remember. But you can.

We could probably, honestly, we could probably do the podcast from this remote if we wanted to. But I already had a remote. We did that. And TJ did that. So I wouldn't be the first. So it is made for home assistant. I'm just looking at their details, right? And it is designed for native home assistant.

So you require home assistant to be able to use this. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, because it's like it needed a, let's it called it, a long live token thing. credentials that you go and set up, like you just get the, that you point it to your home assistant install, and then you give it that token, and then it

can log in and interact with the API that way, but it lets you design and build the interface somehow, so that I've got work on. And it has built-in voice control, which is pretty cool. I guess that works with the home assistant assist. Yeah, it's got like, I didn't even notice these down at the bottom. Oh yeah, it's got the voice control. I see the

voice button on there. It's got little like a light, a shade, a shade, a music and an AC button. So I don't know. This may actually come in pretty handy out here in the garage where I have, well, I don't have shades, but I do have lights. I do have music and I do have an AC. So I can at least take those three buttons and do something with them because all three

of those pieces are integrated into home assistant. So I'll see what I can do. See what happens. I don't know. Maybe I'll figure out the, I've never, I've never wanted to mess with the home assistant dashboard because it's like now that they're doing the, was it area thing? But I just, I don't, I just go to that. that's the first thing.

Areas is the first thing I have on my home assistant, and I don't have to do anything else because all the rooms and lights and everything are just right there. It's pretty easy to get to. So I haven't made anything custom. Other than the one custom interface I have that has the Aria Gwana's falling button on it, that's pretty much it. He's got that.

But other than that, yeah, I haven't, I've got a, most of this says entity not found. It's what I had. And it has the iguanas, and that's pretty much it. So I can delete the rest of these and, and I guess start over on this particular dashboard I made years ago. But I'll give it a try. I'll let you nice to know how it works. 145, the Sanytron hefty remote. I also bought a Chinese remote, but I have not used mine yet.

So maybe you'll encourage me to use mine. Welcome to the club, DJ. It's just what you do. See remote, buy remote. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it is a nice remote. if there are other remotes feel this way. I don't see how this one particularly works

and how well it integrates with the AV stuff that I have. Let's see if I can do that. And you can integrate it with Control 4 somehow. It's a nice remote. It's got a little docking station and everything, so you can just charge it, leave it sitting over there. So give it a go.

Put a link to it in the show note if anybody else is interested. And like I said, check out the other remotes they have there because they have the I remote and I just was downloading drivers to them. they have Crestron and Control Foredrivers for them. So that's pretty cool. And RTI as well.

So there you go, T.J. If you don't like your ITA remote with your ITI system, you could get one of these remotes that looks similar, but slightly smaller. I'll say, remind me RTI for some reason as soon as I saw it. Yeah. Interesting stuff. All right. Well, I think that's it for the night.

We do want to give everyone a big thank you for listening to the show, but especially want to thank those who are able to financially support our show through the Patreon page. If you don't know about our patron page, head on over to hometech. com slash support to learn how you can become a patron for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite over to our private Slack chat the hub

where you and other patrons of the show can get in there and discuss this week's news. You can see what's going on. You can see TJ's cardboard shenanigans. There's always stuff going on in here. What was the last thing that was going in there? There was some things with our... Oh, you can look at Tokyo Jim's shower phone. That's interesting.

You may not be interested in that. And then Gavin posted an interesting diagram of my exact project planning. Thanks, Gavin. That summarizes you to a T, you know. Sorry, project, tell everyone. And then you've got to go around and finish the project back to having a great idea. So that's pretty much the circle of how it goes. That's over the hub.

It's actually happening there. Oh, look, a picture of opossum. How did this... Oh, oh no. Oh, no. They're sacrificing opossums to fight pythons? That's not right. Well, I'm sad.

I scared a little possum friend out of the dryer vent now. They are basically putting tracking collars on the possums and letting the snakes eat them and then they find the snakes. The things you learn inside the hub. It's not just all tech. It's not just all tech. Thanks, Greg, for that story there. That's horrifying. All right.

If you can't support the show financially, we just appreciate a five-star review and positive app. Five-star review or positive rating, the podcast app of your choice. That's going to wrap up this weekend. Everybody, have a great weekend, and we will see you next week. Until next time. Take care. I don't recognize that highway.

So how many, do they have a lot of Mexicans there? In Texas? Yeah. It is Mexico. Yeah, you would need some workers out here to help. Yeah. I had a friend living down in Texas, and I remember she said, yeah, she needed her front yard done.

And she just went to the Home Depot. This is the first time I ever heard of this. She just went to the Home Depot. A couple of them jumped in the car. She took them home. She said they did the best work and it cost me like a few hundred dollars. I didn't know where this was going to go. Plus meals.

Yeah. And I was just like, damn. Have you seen the guy that like picks them up at Home Depot? It takes them to like Disney World and stuff. He takes some roller coasters. Yeah. It's amazing. It's hilarious.

Is that a YouTube video? Yeah. It is like the best videos ever. And they have a blast and then he gives them like $5,000 each at the end of the day or something crazy. And they're all just like bawling and everyone is like crying. Like like oh. Like it's hilarious. Yeah, it's so good.

They're just selling like lots of land in Viter, Texas. I mean, it's probably a place you don't want to actually live. It's just if you're if you're planning on going somewhere, I would not put that high high up on the list. No, it's not a nice place. Look so inviting. It is, but not to you. Oh, my gosh, a Duke's a hazard car. Then they got the flag, too.

Look at that. Well, they throw that in with the house. We have a deal. See me driving around town. The giant cowboy hat on. People would be like, sir, you don't let that car represent. I go, yeah, my childhood. I used to love this, Daisy Duke.

Oh, man. They could have at least cleaned up the house before they took all these pictures. I mean, that is clean, Gavin. Come on. Yeah, man. No, they got all their junk in the garage. It's like, wow, this is pretty bad. Oh, 168,000.

Oh, pretty bad. You all just wouldn't clean that stuff up, so. There's two flags on the front lawn. I don't know what that other, it looks like two American flags, but why would they have? have two American flooding. Uh, he drives a truck. You have to have one in Texas.

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's required. What is the most, okay, what is the most racist town in America right now? It's got to be somewhere in Alabama. Alabama or Oregon. CBC. What is the residents of the most racist town in America say they're working hard to shake that reputation, okay?

Harrison, Arkansas. Uh, but the residents disagree. Oh. Can you're American flags? Oh, that's not an American flag, Gavin. You saw the picture with two flags on the front arm? Yeah, I can't really tell what that is. I don't know what the second flag is.

You can tell the American flag, but the other one is it just another American flag? Yeah, that's a Trump flag. It says Donald Trump on it. Oh, is it? Yeah, they have Trump flags. Wow, they did not clean up. You're right. I mean, they tried.

You can see the floors, so they probably haven't seen the floors since they moved in. Yeah, but you see what I would say, is it a Trump flag? What does a Trump flag look like? You're just buying on the side of the road. There's like, there's these places you buy. That's a really weird place to store, toilet brush. Cellar. Yeah, Arkansas is getting a lot of the most racist town in the States.

Harrison, Arkansas. All right, let's look this up, Laden. Oh, no. Harrison, Arc. I guess that's AR. Wow, they look nice. I'm going to lie. Yeah, look at these houses.

Jeez. 38 acres for a million dollars. Wow. Who do they have doing their work for them? I mean, you know, you always have a plan food. If I have a house, if I have a house this nice, you know, like can I overlook you? You could not, Gavin. That's the point.

Can I overlook? You cannot. Seth and I could. It's a red line around this. And Zillow for some reason. You're going to leave the. cold to go get a nice house? No.

I am not. This house looks racist. It's all yellow. It looks like a plantation house. Wow. Log cabins? Oh, man. I cannot own this.

Kevin, whatever you bought there would burn town. Just you fire insurance. No matter what you spend the money on, it's just going to burn down. Just FYI. Bad electrical. Bad electrical. And it would not be renewed by, oh, look at this billion dollar house. Oh my God.

I mean, this one has 144 acres with a four-bed, five-bath house for 13, or 1.3 mil. I bet you that, with that size lot, I bet you there are a lot black people there. I found five. They would know. Here's a 5.9 million. It's 1,400 acres, though. Wow. Looking at $1 million house, let's see what this one looks like.

This one looks really nice. I'm not going to like, this is nice property. It's got a little stream going through it, caves. Wow. Can you buy it for me? I feel like we're indirectly reinforcing racist. If I had $5.9 million to buy this, you know, I could probably fly you in in a helicopter. No one would know.

That's true. Like, why do the racist towns look so nice? Yeah, I know. Oh, my God. Okay, we need to get the show going because I'm learning way too much. Like, how, like, do they have, like, a line to how black you can be? Yeah. Hey, it's actually, I think they wrote it down somewhere a couple of times.

If you're a little too tan. No, I did a DNA test, and I'm like 30%, you know, like, you know? Like, would that pass? Like, can I... I mean, you passed for so... Can I give them the paperwork and let them decide and apply to buy this house? Wow, this house is all glass. I mean, I have some German in me.

Does that help? No, it actually makes it worse. It's easy. It probably does make it worse. Okay, I'll take that. I have some Jewish in me. That'll make it worse, too. Yeah, that'll make it worse.

Man. Yeah, you're not doing good, Gavin. Yeah, I ain't going to have this house. House. Not for long. This house has like nothing around it. It's just boring looking, but it's a nice house. This is like the kittiest,

kitsiest house I have, I've seen in a while. Oh, yeah, I saw this one. Yeah? You see a little, like, it's like a stained glass windows everywhere. Hell yeah. That's sweet. Look at the, look at the, look at the gardens in the back, T.J.

This is, this is you. Oh, yeah. The gardens. They've got, like, covers and stuff. It's all grown up. Can't get rid of that pool. Is it kind of pool? More room for garden space.

It does have a fool. Wow. That house looks cluttered. It's claustrophobic just looking at these pictures. It's smaller than my house and it has one more bathroom. I'd have to replace that water heater though. I'd have to replace a lot of things. It's not rental.

It's not a rental. That man shed. Oh, God. What the hell? It's just getting worse. I love it. Well, you can live there. Nicole.

They have a ton of trees. They have gooseberry, elderberry, strawberry, strawberries, strawberries. cherry trees, apricots, mulberries. So if T.J. bought the house and said Nicole was his worker, would they be cool with that? Why are you always trying to get me in trouble, though?

You would do that because you're a terrible person. Hey, y'all. For this massive home. Jeez, 6,000, 7,000 square foot house, seven bed, five bath. What's some nice homes. Man. So, so, so, so, so, so, so,

To live good, you got to be racist. You got to be racist, I guess, yeah. So let's do it. All right. I'm going to be racist.